


Ten Fingers Shape a Bowl

by Barking_Spiderweb



Series: Hands in the Garden [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, F/M, Gen, One-Sided Attraction, One-Sided Uchiha Obito/Nohara Rin, Original Character Death(s), SI, Self-Insert, oc-insert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-06-14
Packaged: 2018-11-14 03:19:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11199384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barking_Spiderweb/pseuds/Barking_Spiderweb
Summary: "How foolish of me, to think I was more than just a pawn."(Self-Insert/OC-Insert as Rin.)





	Ten Fingers Shape a Bowl

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Sylvia Plath poem "The Stones".  
> Cross-posted on FanFiction.

•••

I stood with two feet on that principle of where life ended and death began and waited.

•

I found Naoki in the bedroom closet, his back pressed against the wall farthest from the door.

"Rin," He whispered from the darkness, "Come here."

I was terrified then, the way he lurked in the darkness with nothing but the light that reflected off his eyes and the blade he held in his hand to identify him by. It was familiar in such a way that I could only stand frozen in place, terror eating away at every part of me.

_It's cold, so cold. I don't want to die, please. I don't wanna die. God_ —

"Rin," My father pleaded again and this time he moved, extending the hand not holding his tantō and beckoning with it, in hopes of enticing me into the darkness of the closet.

"Tou-san?" I croaked, my limbs locked in place.

He lunged forward then, his hand wrapping around my wrist and dragging me into the closet. I felt a hand close over my mouth and then my father's hot breath on the back of my neck and ear as he shushed my muffled screams.

"There's someone here with us," He whispered instead of continuing to shush me, "You need to be quiet."

I didn't have any choice but to give in to what I assumed was my father's delusions, if he was going to hurt me he would have already done it.

"You're a good girl, Rin, a good daughter."

He released me, his hand moving from my mouth and pushed my back against the wall like he had been not long before. He moved to the closet door, his tantō ready in his hand.

•

"I'm sorry," he sobbed, "God, I'm so sorry."

And I let him hold me.

"Never again," he promised.

I cried with him.

_No, not again. Please not again. I can't, I can't do it again. Please, I can't_ —

•

Sada Kohana was a girl on the cusp of adulthood, someone who I would hesitate to call a woman if it were not for the scar that disfigured the upper left side of her face. The scar itself was a starburst that centered where her left eye should have been, with thin fractures expanding out across the rest of the side of her face.

Her skin was tanned a golden brown from the sun, yet not unevenly coloured or blemished like an older woman's skin would be. Her silky black hair fell down past her shoulders and stopped abruptly at her elbow as if she had it cut recently. Her one good eye was framed by thick dark lashes and accompanied with a delicately arched eyebrow. Her pale grey eye, like a chip of dirty ice, was cold and unmoving even while she smiled. Her lips were two pale pink rose petals, her nose small and slightly upturned, with high cheekbones.

"I don't suppose you remember me, do you?" Her voice was nothing more than a rasp as if she were an elderly woman who smoked her whole life instead of the young one she was in reality. "I had both eyes then," she finished with a smirk.

•

"What does he want with me?!" Naoki asked, and I had to strain to hear him.

"What does he want with you? Are you an idiot, Naoki?" Kohana hissed as loudly as her rasping voice would let her.

"I just want it done with, I want it over. I want him to leave me alone."

I listened to Kohana let out a hollow mocking laugh. Her voice was almost sad as she spoke,"It's never over, Naoki. Nothing ever ends. And Danzō will never let you go."

•

The sun's golden light draped itself over her shoulders, lighting Kohana from behind and presenting her a golden halo. What I had originally believed to be silky black hair was in actuality dark red, the colour of congealed blood.

Her one good eye moved from whatever she had been looking at in the kitchen, that was out of my line of sight, and to me.

"Kid's up," she grunted and continued to gaze into the kitchen.

"Morning!"

"Morning, Tou-san. Kohana-san."

•

"Team 7," Daisuke-Sensei called out, cutting off all the protests caused by the announcement of the previous team. "Uchiha Obito, Yamanaka Leiko, under Namikaze Minato."

My mind stuttered to a stop, I had been sure...

"Team 8," Sensei continued unhindered.

But I couldn't quite remember, this wasn't how it should be, should it?

"Team 10: Ichijo Takahiro, Inuzuka Ken, Nohara Rin, and your Sensei is Nakada Arata." He said at last.

•

"Nakada-Sensei—"

"Arata-Sensei, Ichijo-kun." Arata-Sensei corrected cheerfully. "You three do plan on being my Genin, don't you?" She spun on her heel to face us but didn't slow her pace.

"Y-yes!" Ichijo agreed, and Inuzuka followed with a, "Yes, Sensei."

"Ichijo Takahiro, Inuzuka Ken, and Nohara Rin." Her dark eyes moving from one face to the next as she said each of our names. Then her lips pinched together and her forehead crinkled in thought, but I could still see the smile in her eyes.

"Arata-Sensei," Ichijo spoke up, "You can call me Takahiro."

She smiled again, and I didn't think I had ever seen someone smile as much as this woman did.

"Well then, Takahiro-kun." She looked at Inuzuka and me as if expecting us to say the same.

I caught Inuzuka's eye and shrugged at his questioning look. "Rin, then."

"And Ken," Inuzuka followed up. "This is Risa," he said as an afterthought while gesturing to the fully grown wolfhound that had been following us.

She spun around again and continued to lead us, chattering to Ichijo the whole way.

She stopped abruptly, the ridiculous smile still attached to her face. "We're here, children." She spread her arms wide as if presenting us with something we should be amazed by.

We had slowed to a stop in the middle of the street, there wasn't anything particularly special about the road, people, or stores around us. The ground was a dusty brown, packed down to be as hard as stone, yet uneven. The people were civilian with only a few shinobi dotted amongst them. On the left, the shops were open-air and crammed closer together, while the ones on the right were big enough to have display windows but were still marginally smaller than what I usually saw when I was out with Kohana.

The closest store on the left looked like a convenient story at first glance but it clearly wasn't on closer inspection. It didn't have the open-front like the others, maybe because the shop was narrower or because of another reason I wasn't sure. "NARAYANA," it proclaimed above the narrow window and door, in a plain black scrip. It was awfully strange for a convenient store, not to mention that name was all wrong.

Path of man. The very name made me uneasy.

"Here!" Arata-Sensei proclaimed, and instead of pointing at the far more interesting store, NARAYANA, she was looking at the store on our right.

It was a clothing store going by the display in the front window, a civilian one if I was being specific. The front window had a display of colourful yet impractical clothes that wouldn't be worn by shinobi. With a rack of shirts on sale at the entrance.

"Um, Sensei?" Ichijo started, but Arata-Sensei didn't let him finish.

"Each of you is going to pick out one item of clothing, and explain to me its uses in battle could be." She was still smiling, but there was an edge to it now. "And I want you to steal it, of course."

•

I learned very quickly that while Arata-Sensei was always smiling, they weren't faked in order to lure us into a false sense of security. She was truly happy with her life, and being three months pregnant seemed to just improve her mood.

Ichijo-kun was eager to please with charisma in spades. He was a good person, someone so genuine that at times it hurt to look upon him. That would not last long, but Arata-Sensei fostered his mentality as much as she could.

Ken was quiet, his eyes followed every movement with a determined sense of desperation. It was as if he was willing himself to remember every action we, his teammates, made through sheer force of will. Like he was willing himself to never forget. His shadow, Risa, never talked, she never barked or growled or whined either, she was as silent as a mouse.

•

It was frustrating to go to on D-rank mission after D-rank mission after D-rank mission, it was a cruel reminder of the life I had before all this. The repetition of eating, sleep, work, was a nightmare that I could never escape. Wash, rinse, repeat. A reminder of what I could never have again.

•

As Arata-Sensei explained how Hyūga Yutaka would be our sensei while she was on maternity leave, I was able to come to two conclusions, that Yutaka certainly looked the part of a Hyūga—what I assumed they looked like, being that I had never truly met one before—and that he acted like one.

It almost sounded like I was thinking about an alien race.

•

"Inuzuka!"

I watched carefully as Yutaka-Sensei brushed his hand over the gash on my arm and the skin knit itself back together.

"Anything else?" He questioned, his face impassive even as Ichijo screamed bloody murder behind him.

I quickly did a closer inspection of my arm and shook my head, it didn't feel like I had any other injuries.

"Hm, good." He stared at me unblinkingly for a couple more seconds, his pale pupil-less eyes giving nothing away. "Are you interested in learning iryō ninjutsu?"

"I don't want to be an iryō-nin," I blurted out on instinct. A hot wash of shame came over me and I felt my cheeks and the tips of my ears heat up.

The corner of his mouth inched upwards, his eyes alight. I had never seen anything but the cool indifference on his face before.

"There's nothing wrong with being an iryō-nin. Of course, you can still learn the arts of healing without being an iryō-nin. You just need a mentor."

Was he suggesting what I thought he was? Before I could say any more he stood and turned to watch Ichijo and Ken as they fought. Effectively ending the conversation.

What had been a spar only a handful of minutes ago had dissolved into a petty argument. Ken was holding Ichijo's face in the mud while the other boy screamed for help and mercy. Risa stood off to the side, quiet as ever, but even with her face, I could see how she seemed happy to see the two boys enjoying themselves and acting like the children they were supposed to be.

Yutaka-Sensei let them roll around in the mud for a little longer before speaking up.

"It's time for lunch."

Both boys were ready to go a second after Sensei made his announcement.

•

It was a simple plan in theory, not so much in application.

In application it was a disaster, Risa had been lost somewhere during our escape, Ken hadn't woken in two days and I was starting to suspect that the wound on his leg had been made with a poisoned blade. Ichijo was somewhere with our enemy, unaware that he was caught in a trap. Yutaka-Sensei could look after himself I was sure, but without him, we were all sitting ducks.

•

I was woken in the middle of the night to someone running their fingers through my hair and their palm caressing my face. The side of the bed I was facing dipped under their weight.

"It's just me," Kohana rasped.

I loosened my hold on the kunai tucked between my mattress and bed frame and cracked one eye open to get a good look at Kohana. In the darkness, I could only make out the outlines of her face, the dark pit where her right eye was.

"I need you to listen to me very carefully, Rin."

My gut clenched, knots upon knots, and I was wide awake in an instant.

She took a shuttering breath, and then a long exhale. "Your father loved you very much, you know that. You know that, don't you?"

All I could do was nod, my lips locked together and my throat clenched. Kohana's fingers still smoothed through my hair but it seemed more for her than me.

"I love—Loved you father, and I love you."

Loved?

"I love you Rin, Naoki loved you, and nothing will happen to you if I can prevent it."

"What?" I finally managed to force out.

Kohana let out a broken laugh, I felt the wetness of her tears fall onto my arm.

"Naoki isn't coming home."

•

Yutaka-Sensei simply sat next to me and said nothing. A quiet show of solidarity.

"When I was a boy, my grandfather took me to Naka river..."

•

Arata-Sensei gave me a rueful smile when she caught me staring while she talked with the other, older shinobi. The man named Kagawa stood with his arms crossed in front of his chest, listening while Arata-Sensei and the light-haired shinobi that I heard get called Sakoda argued. Amari Chiyo stood with us Genin instead of participating with the three shinobi closer to her age.

"Amari-san?" Ichijo interrogated, "Do you have an idea what our mission objective it?"

The older woman seemed to debate if it was worth getting in trouble just to get some bored children off her back.

"We don't all have the same mission," she began hesitantly, "Kagawa Haruka, that's the man, will be leaving us after three day's travel. The one arguing with your Sensei is named Sakoda Gina, and we will be leaving the four of you after a week's worth of travel."

That was actually quite surprising, I had never heard of shinobi traveling in groups even though they were on separate missions, but this was wartime so it did make the most sense for safety reasons.

•

"I trust you had fun with Yutaka-san?"

"I wouldn't say fun," Ken mock-whispered to me.

"He's such a slave driver," Inchijo complained., "And he was far more interested in training Rin-chan."

That surprised me, it hadn't felt like he was playing favourites, but I guess training me in iryō ninjutsu was like taking me on as an apprentice and would come off as me being favourite.

Arata-Sensei looked at me then, eyes sharp, "Why would he do that Rin-chan?"

"He's teaching me iryō ninjutsu, Arata-sensei."

She studied me for a moment longer, her eyes sweeping over me critically as if she thought she could see why he picked me or if I would show any physical improvement. Maybe she didn't believe I was deserving of his interest in training me.

•

"And where are you going?"

I startled at the question and spun around, searching for the source of the voice.

It was Kagawa who sat hunched near the dying embers, his face tilted down as if he were starting into them but his eyes were looking at me. He wasn't dressed in the standard Jōnin uniform like he had been wearing earlier in the day. Instead, he wore a pale breastplate over a dark high neck yet sleeveless top, forearm guards that matched the breastplate, a katana strapped to his back that I hadn't seen him with before, and dark pants that went with the shirt. His hitai-ate was absent from his forehead and the tattoo stood out against the pale skin of his arm. All that was missing was the mask.

"I was just going to—Toilet." I had weakly attempted to explain, pointing into the darkness to emphasize the point.

He turned his head to look at me then, his features were as emotionless as the moon that shone above us.

"I'll come with you."

"You don't have to, I mean I'm just—"

He let out a short bark of laughter, but none of it changed the emptiness that consumed his face. "We may still be in Hi no Kuni but we're at war, and you are a Genin." He stood, scooping something that had been set on the ground next to him, without making a sound. Like a ghost. "Lead the way."

"Yes, Kagawa-san."

"Haruka," he corrected, "Kagawa is my mother."

•

Haruka was gone the next morning, three days like Amari had predicted. And then after four days, Amari and Sakoda made their departure, far less dramatic that Haruka's had been. But disappearing in the night in an ANBU uniform couldn't be something easily topped.

It was two days of travel after that, that Amari and Sakoda re-appeared.

"Get up!" Sakoda was shrieking, pulling the boys from their sleeping bags while Arata-Sensei and Amari spoke furiously on the other side of the fire.

"Get up, get up! Get up!"

Ichijo was making pathetic attempts at ignoring her, but Ken and Risa were up and aware instantly.

"What's happened?" I asked, but my question went ignored by the older shinobi.

Sakoda was still screaming.

Arata-Sensei seemed to finish her conversation with Amari and then stepped around the campfire. The smack was loud enough to echo through the admittedly small camp, but not hard enough to cause any serious harm.

"Get it together," Arata-Sensei hissed, and then she turned to the three of us. "Pack your stuff, now, we're leaving." Seeing our hesitation she yelled, "Now!"

There was no order to any of it, I didn't know what had happened, but if it was enough to send a Chūnin into hysterics I didn't want to know.

•

We didn't cover much ground before they caught up, the battle was a mess the short amount of time I managed to say in the fray I quickly became apparent that we were outclassed. A four-man Jōnin squad against a Jōnin sensei, two Chūnin, and three Genin won't last very long.

•

There was only four of us when I was jolted to conscious by voices. Arata-Sensei sat slumped against a tree about six feet over on my left, with a gash dividing her face in two, Sakoda was closer to her but was too busy muttering under her breath while she rocked back and forth to do anything, and Ichijo sat so close that our arms were touching. I could feel him shake uncontrollably, or maybe I was the one that was shaking.

"I say we bring them back to base".

"No," one of them objected, "We don't have time for that. Kokoro said there were shelter three miles to the west, we set up camp there."

"A cave," one of them clarified, quieter than the others.

•

Yūrei they called her, the interrogator, they called her Yūrei.

I knew she wouldn't look like a monster, she wasn't the villain or some great evil that needed to be defeated, but she didn't look like an enemy either. Her skin was milk pale, a left over from when the paleness of your skin defined your wealth, her features were sharp but not too much so, her hair and eyes were the same shade of black. She looked like an Uchiha.

•

She wore genjutsu like a shadow— no, a second skin. She bent reality like a child would play with their dolls, and she did it so thoroughly that there was no point in trying to decipher which one was which.

One moment Ichijo was dead, and the next he was alive and then he was dead again. He must have died sometime within those dreams and alternate realities because she stopped torturing him to get information out of Arata-Sensei and moved onto me. Amari had died sometime amongst it all, I had been locked in place by Ichijo's seeming immortality.

•

Yūrei, I realized hazily, had been the one to pull the man off of me. She dragged him back by his hair until he was clear of my body and then she drew a kunai across his throat with one quick motion. He didn't seem to have understood what was happening, limp and compliant as if he were... Under a genjutsu.

I kept my hand clamped over my throat as tightly as I could but it didn't seem to halt the blood that gushed from my neck with every beat of my hammering heart.

There were voices, Yūrei wasn't standing over to me and talking, but was still over by the man's body talking to someone else. I couldn't make out much more than that they were taller than Yūrei, and their voice was deeper than her's.

I was startled when I felt something cold and wet press against my cheek, forcing me to look away from Yūrei and the individual with her. It was Risa on the other side of me, with her cold wet nose pressed against my face.

•

It took me longer than it should have to comprehend where I was and even longer than that to remember what had led up to that moment.

The sloping canvas roof of the medic tent wasn't something that I had spent my time gazing up at on a regular enough basest to identify it on sight. And yet it was a familiar comfort in that agonizing moment, as I came to terms with the fact that it was all real, that my team had been slaughtered and I had been spared because of something as simple as luck.

The iron grip of guilt closed around my throat and tears stung my eyes.

•

It was about a week after my return to Konoha when I got my first visitor outside of Kohana and Yutaka-Sensei.

He was sitting at the kitchen table with a mug held loosely in hands and his face devoid of feeling as he stared out the window on his right.

"Haruka."

He didn't jolt or turn to look at me sharply when I spoke, just like the night in front of the fire.

"With Kohana here," he said gruffly, turning to look at me with those hollow eyes, "You should probably call me Kagawa."

"Kagawa, then." I corrected carefully.

"It's good to see you've recovered." He commented tonelessly and his eyes slid from my face to my throat, where the scar stood out angry and red against my skin.

I resisted the urge to fidget and cover the mark, there was something wrong with him.

•

"Ah, you're Nohara Rin then?"

Namikaze Minato was blinding, golden hair a mess on the top of his head, wide sparkling blue eyes, and a guileless smile. A smile that didn't show too many teeth like my own did. And to think this man slaughtered people by the hundreds.

"Yep," I said in a poor attempt at cheerfulness. I could play normal, couldn't I?

His smile slipped the slightest bit, and I caught a glimpse of a grieving man.

"Well, we meet at training ground three every Thursday unless something changes. I would recommencement getting there around ten am." The smile reappeared full force as he rambled on, "Kakashi and Obito, your new teammates, will be there. They're both your age and—"

He talked of his team more like they were his children than his students.

•

First impressions failed spectacularly, much to Minato-Sensei's obvious disappointment.

I couldn't particularly blame the boys, while I had almost a year to come to terms with the death of my team, they had lost Yamanaka Leiko just under a month ago. They were still grieving and that exacerbated all of their pre-existing problems, Obito's jealousy, Kakashi's antisocial tendencies, and Minato's forced cheerfulness. They were a mess, and the fact that they were on a team together and sent on missions told me two things about the situation. The team was stacked, everyone here couldn't be taken off the mission roster, and the Village was undermanned and desperate.

•

And then things reached a tipping point in the middle of a mission, in front of the caravan we were tasked with guarding.

"It's your fault she died," Kakashi hissed, and even though he was a foot smaller that Obito he seemed to loom over the older boy. "If you—"

And then Minato was there, and I'd never seen someone so angry as he was in that moment.

•

"Bakashi's in the hospital again," Obito explained.

That led to even more questions, why would he be in the hospital enough for it to be commonplace, especially with the fact that we were all off the mission roster after the last incident.

"Why?"

"Seizures," Obito continued to explain, "Something went wrong with a jutsu. He hasn't been the same..."

He wasn't the same after the seizures, or because of Leiko's death?

•

"She just, you know, jumped between us," Obito said brokenly, tears streaming down his face and his shoulders shaking.

Was that who Yamanaka Leiko was, the kind of girl to die for her teammates? A Konoha shinobi to her very core?

"What was she like?" I asked my hand on Obito's shoulder.

Obito took a couple shuttering breaths before he was able to speak again.

"She was... She was like the wind." He seemed unsure how to word what he wanted to say. "No, she was like a river. Strong beneath the glossy slow-moving surface, deadly yet nourishing."

He looked at me then, his dark eyes searching my face.

"She wasn't meant for front-line fighting, she was infiltration and information gathering. But she loved being alive above all else. She loved training, and talking, and spending time together, even if Kakashi and I were always fighting." He looked down at his hands and hiccuped. "She loved people, and she always knew what to do and say."

She was a better person than me.

"I didn't even hear what she said. I couldn't hear her over the blood that was pounding in my ears, I thought I was gonna die." He gasped, and let out a hysterical peel of laughter, "I heard her yell, and then she was between the two of us. His club caught her in the chest on the first swing, she tried to get up but she just couldn't. The wheezing sounds she made, God, I'll never be able to forget them. Then he brought it down on her head and I was still frozen, still just watching him kill her."

•

A cold wind blew in from the east, caring on it the clean scent of rain.

"We should find shelter," Kakashi announced.

And instead of Obito's usually objections that came whenever Kakashi suggested something, he simply nodded his head in silent agreement.

•

"Can you—Would you hold my hand?" Obito croaked, "I don't want..."

I don't want to die alone.

I took his pale clammy hand in my own blood-stained one, and I leaned forward to pressed a kiss on his only cheek. I loved him, like a brother, not like how he loved me. But I could do this for him.

•

Watching Minato's face crumble when he realized what had happened, was an exercise in control. The utter devastation that played across his features was impossible to look at, and so I did the only thing I could do in that situation. I turned away.

It took me four paces to close the distance between myself and Kakashi, and less time to allow the chasm to grow between Minato-Sensei and the two of us.

Kakashi was dead-quiet, his eyes locked on the horizon, far beyond any place we could ever reach with our mortal fingers. I slipped my blood-stained hand in his own damp one and watched the horizon with him for a moment.

•

"I didn't mean it." He confessed, "What I said about Leiko, I never meant any of it."

"I know," I echoed back but I couldn't give him what he wanted, he would have seen through that lie. "Obito never blamed you," and that's the crutch of it all isn't it, that the person who died never had to deal with anything left unsaid.

Kakashi withdrew his hand from mine and drifted away, into the corpse of trees. The darkness welcomed him like an old friend.

•

To think that returning home would ever be harder than leaving wasn't something I had never considered, and yet it was my reality, and it was crippling.

We were heroes in their eyes, we ended the war with only the cost of one boy's life as the price instead of the hundreds that it would have been if we failed. But I had let that boy die, my own weakness, my own incompetence, my own foolishness had killed Obito. His blood was on my hands, not Kakashi's.

•

My hand quickly turned from the numb to freezing cold that moved up my arm and then just as quickly as before it shifted to an unbearable burning sensation than moved past my arm and consumed my whole body.

_Please_ —

There was blood everywhere and someone was screaming.

•

My right arm looked as if someone had fused the pieces back together, I was missing my ring finger and thick deep scars and discoloured skin consumed all of my arm below my elbow.

I looked like a broken vase glued back together, but one of the pieces was lost to time.

This was the hand that held Obito's in his last moments. I cried.

•

"I named it Isogu," I explained as I careful concentrated chakra in my left hand. Instead of the soothing feeling that came with the chakra of iryō ninjutsu or the heat that came with raw chakra, I felt tingling numbness, as if I had stuck my hand into a bath of freezing ice water.

My hand did not glow like it did when Kakashi used his Chidori or when Minato-Sensei formed the Rasengan. I swiped at the training post in front of me and watched as the wood closest to my hand splintered into shards no bigger than the length and width of my fingers.

When I looked back at Kakashi, the red of Obito's Sharingan continued to follow my movements even though I deactivated the jutsu.

"So," Kakashi said, breaking the silence. "That's the one that..."

"Yeah," I confirmed and then promised him, "You won't shred your arm."

He stared at me for a moment longer, Obito's eye still uncovered.

"There's wood chips in your hair."

•

I was cooking alive, my own blood boiling beneath my skin as the poisonous chakra flooded my system. All the while, the stone floor cold against my cheek, my fingers clawing at nothing and my screams falling on deaf ears.

•

"Rin," Kakashi said, his relief was palatable.

His outstretched hand played the part of the unrelenting judgment, the tired slump of his shoulders my death sentence, and his cool trembling hand in my own a executioners blade at my neck.

I could return only with a broken, "Kakashi."

Kakashi didn't say it, but the iron grip on my hand and the lazy spin of Obito's Sharingan spoke for itself.

•

It's a split-second decision, one with no room for regret or hesitation, after all, I had my whole life to prepare for this moment, didn't I? And yet, it's still a bitter pill to swallow, the knowledge that I was always meant to be someone else's tool, that no matter my actions I was simply doomed from the start. How foolish of me, to think I was more than just a pawn.

Like a good girl, I jumped into the path of Kakashi's Chidori.

•••

**Author's Note:**

> (18/08/09): I went through the whole thing instead of my usual spot treatment, if you catch anything let me know.  
> (18/02/09): A few minor touch-ups (again) to make things prettier. I'm debating whether or not I should add a few scenes that I had originally cut, mostly because I eliminated characters that are part of the main plotline in the sequel. The side story that follows Leiko is almost complete, but that story is far more graphic than this one, so I'm not sure if it's what people want after reading something as safe as this.  
> (17/10/29): Cleaned up some grammatical errors, rewrote a few sentences so they flowed together better.
> 
> I got my groove back!  
> Because this was originally a full-length multi-chapter fic that I cut into bite-size pieces a lot of things got cut. Some characters got simplified, others lost their agency, and some where cut out of the story completely. The death of her team isn't really addressed because it contained characters that got cut, the team Minato stuff is short because a lot of his was dedicated to her mental health, and a Root subplot. There are plot-lines that lead no where but I included them because they will be addressed in the side stories, spin-offs, sequels, and maybe even prequels. (That Root subplot.)
> 
> Why didn't you just post the whole thing?  
> It wasn't very well written, this isn't even very good. And while I write the end first, then the planing, then the important parts, the ending only had the planing and important parts. I hadn't touched this thing in years and even with the planing (four thousand words) I could never replicate what I was doing, you would get something written in a different style.  
> Some stuff does seem to be written in a different style?  
> Yeah, even though I hacked this monster to bits to avoid the style clash I still had to write some parts to make it less choppy (still really fucking choppy, I know).  
> What's up with Nahora Naoki, NARAYANA, Kagawa Haruka, and Yūrei?  
> HAHAHAHA! Root subplot and ANBU subplot.  
> Inuzuka Ken and Risa?  
> Cross between ANBU subplot and Inuzuka subplot. (Don't worry, Risa was the main focus not Ken. Yeah. The dog's origin was a plot-line. What a joke.)  
> Things not addressed in the story but that should have been:  
> Rin's terrifying paranoia, Obito's crushing guilt over Leiko, Leiko herself, Naoki and his suspicious actions/death, Rin's guilt, Nakada Kohana and her emotional support, and pretty much everything/one else.
> 
> Now that I'm done bitching I'm not gonna make any promises (I'm a liar and a procrastinator at heart) but all those continuations I rambled about have planing but aren't written. I might come back and do a overhaul of the whole original series and post it.  
> Thanks for reading, have fun.


End file.
